Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/40

Dost Ali smiled at the gesture. Thank Allah, he thought, this babbling heretic was a man after all. He would not eat dirt. He would fight.

"Good!" he breathed the word, and his own sword flashed free. But the next moment the hadji's hand dropped—dropped like a wilted, useless thing; and the Red Chief smiled again—a different smile, slow, cruel—and again he spoke.

He chose his words carefully, each a killing insult, and he spoke in an even, passionless voice to let their venom trickle deep. Moreover, such is the Afghan code with its strange niceties of honor and prejudice, that unless he who is insulted respond immediately with the point of the dagger, the consciousness of moral rectitude rests with him who insults; and so Dost Ali was shocked, morally as well as ethically, when the hadji stood there and smiled; in spite of the fact that he had called him a beggar, a cut-off one, the son of a, burnt father, a foreigner, and a Yahudi; though he had wished that his hands be withered and his fingers palsied; though he had compared him to the basest kinky-haired one that ever hammered tent peg, and to one cold of countenance; though he had assured him—"ay wall'ahi!" the Red Chief reënforced the statement, "by the teeth of God and mine own honor!"—that his head was as full of unclean thoughts as a Kabuli's coat is of lice, and that he himself, though an impatient man, would rather hunt for pimples on the back of a cockroach than for manliness and decency in the heart of such a one—"as thou, O son of a hornless and especially illegitimate cow!"

And still the hadji was silent, passive, his sword hand twisting the wooden beads of his rosary, only the